Do you still use toilet paper with a bidet?

When the topic of bidets comes up, people invariably have a lot of questions. One common topic of discussion concerning bidets is how they are related to toilet paper usage: do you still use toilet paper with a bidet, and if so, how much?

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You will run out of toilet paper in approximately 17 days.🥺😟

In this article I'll explain how toilet paper and bidets work together, my family's usage of toilet paper with our bidet, and give you some recommendations about how to make your toilet paper last as long as possible.

Bidets do not replace toilet paper, but they do reduce how much toilet paper you need to use. Bidets wash away most things on their own, but sometimes a small amount will be left. You then use a small amount of toilet paper to wipe away what remains and to dry yourself. This can typically be done with a single wipe. Compared with the multiple wipes that may be necessary when using toilet paper by itself, this saves a lot of toilet paper.

To find the relationship between toilet paper usage and bidets, I tracked my family's toilet paper usage for the course of the past several days. My family consists of my wife and I: one adult man and one adult woman. We used two rolls of toilet paper over the course of 8 days. Extrapolating out to a month, we should use about 7.5 rolls per month. To be conservative, we can round that to 8 rolls per month, or 96 rolls annually for the two of us.

We normally buy our toilet paper in packs of 30 from Costco. It feels like we only buy toilet paper about three times per year, so this estimation seems about right. If we use one roll every 4 days, then one 30-pack should last us 120 days, or 4 months.

As I noted before, our family is just my wife and I, so our toilet paper usage is probably different from yours. As a rough starting point, we can say that a roll of toilet paper lasts roughly 8 days divided by the number of people using it. One roll of toilet paper would last one person 8 days, two people 4 days, three people 2.6 days, and four people 2 days.

Of course, this is assuming equal toilet paper usage. I'd guess that families without bidets easily use twice as much toilet paper, so a family of four without any bidets would only last a day on a single roll of toilet paper. If you have to wipe twice as much to get clean, you're probably going to use twice as much toilet paper.

If you're looking to save toilet paper, a bidet is definitely the way to go. It takes fewer wipes to get clean with a bidet. Once you've gotten a bidet, you can stretch your toilet paper even further by using the drying function of your bidet. This blows warm air to help dry you before you wipe up what's left. If you're a little drier, you can probably get away with using fewer squares.

If you have a bidet, you still need toilet paper. However, bidets clean away most stuff on their own, so you don't need to use much toilet paper to clean up what's left. If you're really in a pinch, there are ways to reduce your toilet paper even more with a bidet by making use of the drying function. Bidets save toilet paper, and they help you get even cleaner with less effort.